I've had Vonage for about 4 months. It has not been a problem (besides the occasional voicemail glitches) until this week.

Calls are fine, but every 4 to 5 minutes the connection seems to go bad and I cannot hear the person on the other end or I can just hear bits and pieces. If I wait long enough, or if the other person doesnt hang up, I can usually continue the conversation. This is very frustrating.

I have called Vonage numerous times. Wait times have been absolutely awful. They seem to keep blaming my ISP.

My ISP is COX and they keep saying my connection is fine.

I have since disconnected my phone and router hoping to use pingplotter to evaluate my broadband connection. Problem is, COX is "unfamiliar" with the utility and isnt helping me much. Does anyone have a suggestion?

I'd like to figure this out myself and determine if it is a problem with my equipment before I have a tech come out here ($50 service call).

Once the application is up and running, follow these steps to set the PingPlotter up to run a thorough test:

1- Right click on where it says "DNSname", in the top center of the screen. One by one, place a check mark by all the different options on the top of this menu. This will tell the test to give you all the detailed data during the test.

2- On the lower left hand side of the screen, ensure these are the settings: "# of times to trace" = Unlimited (should be this way by default), "trace interval" = 2.5 seconds (click the down arrow), and "samples to include" = ALL (click the down arrow).

3- On the top left hand side of the screen, click on "Edit", the "Advanced Options", then "Packet Options". The forth option down says "Packet Size in Bytes, default 56"; change this to 1400, then hit "OK". The MTU (Maximum Transmission Size) of the data in an Ethernet packet is 1518 bytes. Some routers across the Internet may restrict packets of this size, so if the results look very, very poor, you can try to set the packet size to 1200 bytes.

4- Now that the application is set up to begin the test, we need to enter the appropriate IP address or domain name to trace to at the top left hand of the screen. If you are east of the Mississippi (except NJ), trace to this IP address 63.123.233.30.If you are west of the Mississippi (except CA), trace to this IP address 63.236.4.243

5- Now hit the big "Trace" button on the lower left hand side of the screen and let the test the run for about two minutes. Your test should look something like this: »pingplotter.com/nessoftgraph.gif[?]

6- You can leave the test running. Now that we have the results, we have to see if there is a problem across this route. The first hop is your location; the last hop is where you are testing to. We are mainly concerned with two columns on this test. The third column, which is the PL% (packet loss percentage), and the sixth column, Ave (Average Latency at that hop, measured in milliseconds). Since the Vonage service is a "real-time" streaming audio service, any packet loss is a bad thing, as this will cause choppy audio. As far as latency, we worry about our service when the average latency reaches around 150ms or higher across the hops. If either of these results is excessive, this may cause a call to drop, or the link from your ATA to our servers to break.

7- If you need our assistance in interpreting these results, you can send us what you are seeing on your end. To do this, click on "File" on the top left hand side of the screen, the on "Save Image". Save the image to your desktop, so it is easy to locate. Then send us an email and attach the image, so we can take a look. If you are working from an existing ticket, just reply to that email and attach. If a new issue, send to service@voange.com so we can take a look. Only your ISP has authority to correct the latency and/or packet loss issues across your Internet connection; please contact them with these results, if they are poor.